Episode Notes

In this episode I discuss my 486Dx/33 the first computer I owned and my first modem.

Transcription: Welcome to conversations with Kerry, a series of audio interactions with people and things in my world that I find interesting. If you have any comments, queries, questions or feedback, you can find me as at h on Twitter or email me [email protected] thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy the podcast.

Hello everybody, and welcome to this episode of the podcast called my third computer. Now don't panic. We're not going to do an episode of the podcast on every computer I have ever purchased over the past 30 years or so. That would be a podcast series in its own right, and probably extremely boring and uninteresting to the listeners. However, the third computer that I considered my computer was a machine that was purchased for me in 1993. Now, there were some interesting circumstances that surrounded the purchasing of this computer. My first computer, as we remember, was the Keynote XL, which was obtained for me in 1987 and that was purchased for me by the Lions Club of WeWar and Narabra. The second computer that I used throughout my high school years, the keynote PC Plus. I got my hands on that in 1990, and that served me through until the time I got my actual first personal computer and I was doing my first year of year twelve. I'd split my year twelve over two years and was doing it using the pathway scheme, which allowed me to do year twelve in two years rather than one. And we were contacted by the Lions Club to say that the trust fund that had been established for me was supposed to be disbanded when I turned 18, or at least the trust fund had to be emptied of the money by a certain date. And they asked if there was a specific purchase that would do me the maximum amount of good and make a fundamental difference to my quality of life in February 1993.

And the answer was my first personal computer. And I contacted a couple of friends of mine who knew far more about computers than I did. And this was the days before the World Wide Web and before the days that the Internet was as popular it is today. And we were searching with things like Archie and we were looking on FTP sites and trawling through Usenet archives. And I spoke to two friends, Tim and Shane, who suggested that I go through a computer shop in Sydney and purchase a computer from them. We had gone around and looked at local computer stores. We'd looked at Marnie Computers in Tamworth, and we'd looked at Osborne when Osborne was still selling computers before it went belly up as far as its computer business was concerned. And we looked at another one of the CPS computers, but nobody really had a lot of computers in stock. They were expensive. The shops didn't sort of keep a lot of them on shelves at that time. Sort of predated the big department store, like Harvey Norman and stuff, getting into electronics and stuff. So we spoke to a computer store, and for the princely sum of $2,995, I'm sure they just put 2995 to make it look nicer from a marketing perspective than charging a flat 3000 for it.

I got the following computer hardware. A full tower case. Now, for those of you who know your old 80's style case specifications, this predated ATX that had space for four. No, it had space for six, five and a quarter inch half height drives, or three full height drives. It had space for two, three and a half inch externally accessible drive bays, and it had support for two internally accessible hard disk bays. The processor in this beastie was a 486 DX 33. That's right, 33 MHz. And the 486 DX 33 was suggested to me because it contained a floating point unit. Now, prior to this, when we looked at processors prior to the 486, so the 386 and all the way down, if you wanted a floating point unit, you would have to add in a 387 coprocessor. And you may validly ask yourself, why would a floating point unit be useful in a modern computer? And some software could utilize the three eight seven floating point to do much faster arithmetic using decimal numbers. And as you can all hear, there's rain coming down at the back. So I apologize for that, but not much I can do about the rain. That's going to have to stay in the recording. And that was the case. The processor was a 486 DX 33. The system board, I believe, was a PC partner system board. It's been a while. It was an 80's system board, full size 80. You can look that up on Google if you want to know how big that was. Six ISa slots and no onboard peripherals. So no serial ports, no parallel ports, purely just the system board and the processor. The machine had eight megabytes of ram, which was kept in eight one meg 30 pin sims, which were the little thin sticks of memory that would slide in at a 45 degree angle and then slide down to be vertical. So there were eight slots on the board, and all were populated with one meg 30 pin sims. In the system was a multi io card, which had your standard multi io layout for that sort of era of computing. So it had two serial ports, one parallel port and a games port. It had a floppy controller, and it had one IDE hard disk controller, or integrated drive electronics, as they were called, renamed in later years to Atappi. Once the protocol had changed, the machine had a 1.2 meg high density five and a quarter inch drive, and it had a 1.44 meg 3.5 inch drive. This was my dream, to have a machine that had both a five and a quarter inch drive and a three and a half inch drive so I could copy media from one size disk to another.

This was one of the big dreams of good computer at the time. And it had a Trident T 8900 ISA video card. And the computer came with a keyboard, a 14 inch interlaced VGA monitor that was capable of 1024 by 768. That was the highest resolution that monitor could handle. It was a CRT. It was quite heavy, it was quite bulky. Your 15 pin VGA connector, as you'd expect, that plugged into the trident, and then a power connector that ran into the power supply on the case. You could plug the monitor into the case. There was an IEC female power connector on the case, and you could then connect that into the monitor, and that would power the monitor. Now, the PC had a pc speaker wired up, but it had no sound card. So two serial ports, one parallel port, one game port, eight meg of ram. It also had one IDE controller that was connected on the Isopus, and the hard drive was split up into one partition when I got the machine of 212 megabytes. The hard drive being a faithful Maxta seven two 1380 IDE drive. So for the first month, my computer ran DOS, just DOS five, a copy of the ASAP screen reader.

And due to another very generous donation that I had gotten that year, I had access to an arctic transport speech synthesizer, which I plugged onto one of the serial ports. Now, they were asking me whether there was anything else that needed to be added into the computer over and above the base computer specs, because that was the basic stuff that you got with a computer in those days. And we had asked if we could get a modem. Now, for those of you who don't know what a modem is, it's a modulated demodulator, a device for sending digital data acoustically over the planol telephone system, the PSTN public switch telephone network. And for an extra $649, they got me a Spirit Two modem. So, an australian branded modem sold by Dick Smith Electronics at the time, maximum speed of 14,400 bits per second. So in the old modem speak, the maximum capability was v 32 biz. It had data compression for data that was compressible, and it had error correction that could be negotiated between you and the remote modem. Now, I can't remember the names of the error corrections. MNP 4 and MNP 5 are springing to mind, but it's been a long time since I did modem tech, so on one of the system was a spirit two modem, and on two was my speech synthesizer. Now DOS wasn't a bad operating system.

It worked reasonably well. There was stuff I could run under it. DOS five had some interesting quirks. I learned how to optimize my low memory and how to get DOS into high memory, and how to make sure that as much of the main memory was free. And I would spend an hour or two optimizing my config sys and auto exec band to make sure it was all set up properly. Now, in March of 1993, Shane sent me six 1.2 meg high density five and a quarter inch disks. The first disk was a boot disk, the second disk was a root disk. And when you booted up the first disk it would load Linux 0.99 patch level four. It's the first kernel I ever ran, and you would switch over and put in the root disk, hit enter, it would load the root disk, and then I had to execute do shell/dev/cua1 /bin/sh and that would actually throw up a shell on the serial port by which I could access the Linux system from my school laptop. So I had a null modem running from two of the system into the laptop, and then on the laptop I had Ms kermit running and I could actually do the Linux install onto the hard drive. So my first job was to split my 212 meg hard drive into two partitions of approximately 100 meg each, 100 meg for DOS and Windows 3.1 and 100 meg for my Linux install. And a few days before I traveled to education camp, I installed my first copy of Linux off those six or eight 1.2 meg high density floppies. And that allowed my system to dual boot Linux or DOS using Lilo. And I could either choose to come up in DOS with my Windows setup for sighted people because windows wasn't really accessible to me back then. Or I could come up in Linux and use that from my laptop over a null modem cable. And for years, probably up until 1999, I did most of my Linux access over a null modem cable using Ms Kermit or telex. And in fact I had floppies that I had used either Lzxe or diet to shrink down the copies of Ms. Kermit and stuff to take up less space and stored those on the floppy disk so that I could actually log into the Unix system and administer it.

Now, interestingly enough, the computer wasn't bad, but I discovered that I wanted multimedia capabilities on my computer. It didn't come with multimedia capabilities because that was significantly more expensive. And I remember going down to the local Harvey Norman that did have a reasonably sized electronics division and I bought a multimedia kit for $299 and that included a Pro audio spectrum 16 sound card, which is one of the quietest, cleanest early sound cards that I've ever seen on a computer, and a Phillips CMS 206 CDROM, which was barely capable of sustaining one X CD speed and most multimedia content that required a reliable data speed from the CDROM would stutter and shake and do all sorts of annoying things with the CDROM drive because it really wasn't that fast. The other big problem I had with the multimedia kit that I had bought at the time was that the Pro audio spectrum 16 card was beautifully supported by OSS free sound drivers under Linux. However, the CDROM interface for the Phillips CMS 206 was not supported under Linux. So I had access to CDROM disks in DOS Windows, but no access to cd's in Linux, which is where I ultimately wanted to install my software from when I had purchased my Linux CDs by mail order.

Now, before I had the multimedia kit, I had gone out and bought myself a soundblaster Pro card. And I don't know whether you remember the soundblaster Pro cards, but they were only capable of stereo up to 22,050 samples per second. They were an eight bit card. They basically did take the computer from producing no audio to producing quite a reasonable amount of audio, including fm midi files and passable quality stereo sound out of the Soundblaster Pro, which was also supported in Linux. Now, when I upgraded to the Pro audio Spectrum 16 and the Philips CMS 206, unfortunately the CDROM wasn't supported. But the sound card was beautifully supported and it supported 16 bit sound at up to 44 100 samples per second, which was quite nice for the time. Very clear line in, very clear microphone in a very well shielded and constructed card. After this, I bought a newer multimedia kit which was a Mitsumi two speed drive and was one of the knockoff sound cards that had a Panasonic, Sony, and Mitsumi CD interface on it. So it basically had three sets of pins that you could plug one CD ROM drive onto, and then you would set jumpers to say which CD ROM drive would actually work on those connector pins.

Now interestingly enough, the Mitsumi CD ROM was supported under Linux, and once I had set the base io port and interrupt line correctly, I was able to access cd's under Linux and install lots of software onto my hard drive off cd's, which was much faster than downloading it at 14.4k bits per second over a modem. So it was a different world. The actual sound card I had was an ESS 1688, which is the one that predated the plug and play setup. And it meant that I could connect a cable from my computer into an amplifier, run it into a set of speakers and games such as Comanche Maximum Overkill could produce very realistic explosions and sort of a very mechanical sounding voice saying target destroyed, which from a computer that couldn't produce any audio or at least just beeps and clicks. And there were ways of getting audio out of the pc speaker, but it was quite a messy, yucky sounding audio that came out using pulse width modulation and extremely high CPU load.

But that was my first computer and that computer served me all the way through until 1995. And it was a good machine. It did everything I asked of it. I had it for quite a long time. The first machine ever to be known as G o t s s 1, gotss 1. Now, interesting history of Gotss, which you've seen in my email address and I've announced it on every episode of the podcast that I've ever produced. Back when I was 13 or 14 at high school, we had decided that we would create a secret club that we originally called the Secret Society of the Silicon Sorceress. And a friend of mine had come up with a snake looking logo that was made of a whole lot of connected S's because we had SSS, which was all very illiterate and stuff. But we decided that the secret society of the Silicon Sorcerers sounded a bit pretentious. So I opted for something slightly less pretentious, although probably just as pretentious, and renamed the club to the Guild of the Silicon Sorcerers, which were a set of knowledgeable computer users, including myself, people that I considered friends and allies in my computer escapades.

And we would get together and do various projects and cooperate and very skullduggery and GOTSS became a sort of moniker for things I had. And my first Linux box was called GOTSS 1. When my first Linux box got increased access to the Internet and networking support went into the kernel. As of 0.99 patch level nine, I actually ended up having to rename the machine to Gotss1.apana.org.au. And Apana was the Australian Public Access Network association and they were trying to bring affordable Internet to hobbyists from the big providers and provide email and other connectivity services.

So my email was actually sent and received over the modem via UUCP. And in fact I set up Taylor UUCP to do this. And my mail transfer agent was responsible for handing stuff off to UUCP, which would be uplinked to a machine called Ion which stood for Internet online. That was a machine run by my friends in Sydney for a while, and then from there the mail would be batched out and sent out to the Internet proper. So the MX records for Gotss1.apana.org.au were pointed to various machines in the Apana network which were then responsible for batching up that mail and sending it to me via UECP. And I used to call up two or three times a day over the telephone network with my modem to send and receive email. So all of you youngsters and people who are used to getting almost instant email delivery, I would check and send and receive email and Usenet news groups for the news groups that I had subscribed to twice to three times a day. And I did not have real time access to the Internet apart from shell accounts. So that was Gotss one, the first computer I ever owned. If you've got any questions, comments, feedback, you can ask them if there's anything more you want to know about the machine. It was a good machine. It served its time. The hard drive was always reliable. The drives worked well. I remember it had a BIOS that was an AMI BIOS from June 92, which seemed to be compatible enough.

The system CMos was pretty straightforward. We knew what all the options did. And in fact these were the days before an IO epic. And an IO epic basically allows a modern computer to have up to, I think, 256 interrupt request lines. Back in the day we had 16 IRQ, obviously IRQ zero being used for timer, and IRQ one being used for the keyboard, and IRQ eight being used to chain the two controllers together, and various other interrupt request lines used for other things. IQ seven being used for the parallel port. So certainly a look back into the old days of personal computering and pc computing, where your computer could essentially cooperatively multitask in Windows 3.1, or it could multitask in Linux. This was before Minix had become free. Or you could run various other operating systems on the four eight six. I still remember silly things about the machine, like the fact that the processor had two hundred and fifty six k of cache external cache, and that basically made the processor behave like a 111 mhz PCAT, the original PCAT running at 6 MHz. So, fun times indeed!

But thanks for listening. Hopefully this one hasn't been too boring. Certainly an exploration into the worlds of nostalgia and old time computing. And if anybody has any questions, hit me up and ask me and I'll be happy to tell you anything you want to know about Gotts one or anything else you might happen to want to know about that time of my life. Thanks for listening.

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